The world changed abruptly on the morning of Sep. 11, 2001 when the World Trade Center was attacked and destroyed by terrorists. Although New York City felt the impact first and foremost, the impact of the attack is global in scope and long lasting. The World Trade Center illustrates how a significant human-caused disaster, such as terrorist activity, can completely destroy the operation of a telecommunication network element. Nevertheless, a telecommunication network element may fail, for example, due to damage or destruction by one of several disaster events. Such disaster events include damage or destruction by fire, flood, earthquake, war, or sabotage. Several scenarios, including the following, are possible: partial failure of a network element, such as a Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) service platform; failure of a single network element such as a DWDM service platform; failure of multiple network elements; and failure of an entire node of network elements. With the global telecommunication network, a network element may include international traffic communications gateways. If an international network element is destroyed or damaged, major global economic centers and billions of financial transactions may be at significant risk.
It is known that collateral damage from the World Trade Center attacks caused local toll services provided next to the World Trade Center to suffer enormous damage to million data lines and hundreds of thousands of telephone circuits. While thousands of personnel worked continually to repair the damage to the local facilities, unfortunately many businesses and individuals waited many months to recover their voice and data services critical for operation. This enormous problem illustrates the significant need for an effective disaster backup and restoration system and process.
One primary method of contingency and disaster recovery relies on data stored only in each network element unit. The data's availability for disaster recovery is highly valuable for planning and recovery of a vital core network. Similarly, the data is highly valuable for planning and recovery of Presidential, government, military, and commercial private telecommunication lines traveling through network elements. Although the data about the mapping states of each circuit traversing through the network element is important for restoring the service to its original pre-disaster state, the data stored within each unit is relatively volatile and vulnerable to destruction in a disaster.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,420,917, “Automated Recovery of Telecommunications Network Elements”, issued on May 30, 1995, in the name of Richard Guzman, and assigned to AT&T Corp., the assignee of the present invention, describes a method for automated restoration of one or more inoperative DCSs in a telecommunications network. In accordance with the teachings of the '917 patent, restoration of a plurality of inoperative DCS is accomplished by first connecting a plurality of restoration DCS through guided media, in the form of cables, radio channels or the like, to the inoperative DCS. Thereafter, the profile of each inoperative DCS (i.e., its cross-connection data) is obtained from a network database, referred to as the DCS Operation Support System (DCS-OSS). A technician then translates the cross-connections needed to restore the each inoperative DCS into a circuit map in accordance with the cross-connect capability of each restoration DCS. The circuit map is ported to the restoration DCSs and is thereafter executed by such DCSs to restore service.
While the restoration technique disclosed in the '917 patent is effective, the technique nevertheless suffers from the drawback that the profile of each inoperative DCS may not always be accurate. In practice, the profile for each inoperative DCS is obtained by periodically inspecting that DCS. Depending on the traffic it carries and its location, a DCS may only be inspected as often as every six months. Between such six month intervals, a telecommunications network service provider will likely re-provision a DCS to alter its cross-connections to add, remove or modify service. Hence, there is a significant likelihood that the stored profile for a given DCS will not include such recent provisioning information. Hence, that restoration of a DCS using its stored profile often will not result in a complete restoration of all service.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,047,385 “Digital Cross-Connect System Restoration Technique”, issued to Richard L. Guzman et al. on Apr. 4, 2000 and owned by the assignee of the present application, presents one solution to the problem of disaster preparedness. While effective, the '385 patent relies on operational support systems of a network vendor to provide provisioning data. Hence, there is a risk if the operation support systems are not available (damaged or destroyed) that the updates may not occur as expected. Accordingly, it is desirable to eliminate the need of operation support systems for disaster preparation and restoration.
Users of telecommunications equipment deployed to transport optical electrical signals have a general problem of attempting to manually restore service after the destruction of the central office complex or point of presence. This significant problem includes government and military installations as well as commercial users of optical equipment. Emerging optical communication technologies, such as DWDM systems suffer the same general vulnerabilities in that destruction of the central office equipment requires intensive manual labor in restoration time and resources. Further, there appears no effective method of disaster preparedness for the critical technologies, such as DWDM systems. Accordingly, there is a significant need in field of telecommunications for a system and method of disaster preparedness and restoration of service of network elements.